Our network was formed to examine the role of clothing fashions as a powerful and pervasive cultural intermediary between Britain, Japan, China and Korea. Fashion crosses and confounds geographical boundaries in a myriad of ways, and yet notions of national identity remain central to the dynamics of fashionable dress as cultural expression. Fashion design often uses the ‘exotic’ as a reliable source of novelty and luxury, but an item of fashionable clothing can be designed in one hemisphere, manufactured in another, and retailed globally while maintaining a brand identity attached to nation. British high-street chain Marks and Spencer and the Japanese label Uniqlo have multiple stores in China. Both of these brands have also recently been joined on London’s Oxford Street by Chinese store Bosideng, providing the first tangible presence of Chinese high street fashion in Britain. In China, the influence of Korean fashion is also increasing and threatens to displace the position of Japan as a style leader in some fashion sectors. Internet shopping and fashion blogging further calls into question the significance of national borders, while promoting highly distinct European and East Asian identities.

The last decade has also seen a sea change in fashion studies. Western forms of fashion within non-western contexts are being reconsidered to produce new readings of fashion as a far less geographically contingent vehicle for individuality, cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, and global networks of money, goods and ideas. East Asian fashion is recognized as ‘speaking’ to British consumers as European fashion has ‘spoken’ to East Asia. Our network draws on UK and internationally based academics, artists, museum curators, fashion industry professionals and students, working together to produce a new understanding of transnational fashion exchange as an agent of cultural translation.